Changes that Animals experience during Lunar and Solar Eclipses

Animals have a very different behaving phenomenon compared to humans as they have a tendency to structurize their days and even their years as it depends on the dark and light cycle. Their schedules of hibernation, migration, sleeping, and breeding depend on the regular cycle of the length of the days as it signifies the scheduling of several natural phenomena in animals. Well, such things depend on the daylight cycle animals experience but on the other hand, the moon cycle also differentiates and justify the change in their behaviors. The moon’s journey from the full moon to the full moon which is almost 28 nights makes changes in the gravitational pull of the Earth and the light levels in the night. A lot of different animals use such synchronizations for breeding such as corals lay tens of millions of eggs at once as they synchronize with new moons.

Image Source: Joel D. Tonyan

Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse is known for one of the biggest changes in the animal behavior as it has been observed a lot of times that the animal species get puzzled and star following their night schedules and some nocturnal animals start to think as they have overslept. The solar eclipse tends to happen when the moon, the Earth and the Sun comes in the same axis as the moon cover up the sun totally and disables sun rays to reach the earth. A lot of weird behaviors and incidents are generally reported on the day of the solar eclipse. It has been observed that some spiders start to break down their webs during the eclipse as generally, spiders follow such process at the end of the day. It has also been observed that the nocturnal bats get confused because of the sudden darkness due to the eclipse as they come out in the day time. Similarly, birds and fishes get confused in the day and night as they star following their night schedules and head to their resting places that they usually prefer in the night time.

The Lunar Eclipse

The lunar eclipse appears when the Earth blocks the sunlight from reaching to the moon which makes the moon look red-ish. This happens because the Earth comes close to the alignment of the sun and the Earth gets in the middle of the sun and moon. The red-ish turned moon is also called the blood moon which only occurs when there is a full moon and it also affects the animals but there are no such differences between the impacts of lunar eclipse and impacts of a standard full moon. In a study, it was found out that the lunar eclipse highly affected the Azara’s owl monkeys which is a typical nocturnal species lost their sight because their world suddenly got darker and they stopped foraging. The supermoon appears for three times in a year as it is the point when the moon is closest to the Earth and it is known as the perigee event. During the perigee event, the moon gets about 46,000 km closer to the Earth. The amazing fact about the perigee event is that wild barnacle geese change their behavior as their heart rate and body temperatures increases at night.

The Lunar Cycle and Humans

It has been a very intriguing topic regarding human nature and the lunar cycle. There were many stories connected to human behavior change and the lunar cycle. Most of the stories were connected between the lunar cycle and the wolves. Terms such as lunatic which is also a term used for the moon was used for those people who were mentally ill, or unpredictable. It was also believed that the lunar cycle also affected the birth rate, fertility, and epilepsy.